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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Linguistic determinism

【答案】 Linguistic determinism , is one of the two points of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , and has developed into the strong version of this hypothesis. It could be summarized as follows: （1） One‟s thinking is completely determined by his native language because one cannot but perceive the world in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in the language. （2） The categories and distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other systems. Therefore , the following statement could represent this hypothesis 4tIf Aristotle had spoken Chinese , his logic would have been different”.

2． CAI and CAL

【答案】 Computer-assisted instruction （CAI ） means the use of a computer in a teaching program. This includes:

a. A teaching program which is presented by a computer in a sequence. The student responds on the computer , and the computer indicates whether the responses are correct or incorrect.

b. The use of computers to monitor student progress, to direct students into appropriate lessons, material , etc. This is also called computer-managed instruction.

Parallel to CAI , there is CAL （Computer-Assistant Learning ） . The former aims at seeing educational problems on the part of the teacher, whereas the latter emphasizes the use of a computer in both teaching and learning in order to help the learner achieve educational objectives. The first kind of CAL programs which were developed reflected principles similar to programmed instruction. The computer leads the student through learning task step-by-step, asking questions to check comprehension. Depending on the studenfs response, the computer gives the student further practice or progresses to new material （see branching ）. In more recent CAL courseware students are able to interact with the computer and perform higher-level tasks while exploring a subject or problem.

3． Innateness hypothesis

【答案】 The “Innateness Hypothesis” of child language acquisition wa s proposed by Noam Chomsky , who states that language are somewhat innate and that children are bom with what he calls a language acquisition device, which is a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning.

4． Hyponymy

Hyponymy. It refers to the sense relationship between a more general, more inclusive and 【答案】

a more specific word. The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordiante, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. For example , the hyponymy relationship could be established between “animal” and “rabbit”.

5． Contextual meaning

【答案】 It is also called speaker‟s meaning, or utterance meaning, which is more closely related to the context. For example, when a person says “My bag is heavy”，what he actually means may be asking the hearer to help him carry the bag.

6． Cognition

【答案】 Cognition is, in psychology, used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a concept which argues that the mind has internal mental states （such as beliefs, desires and intentions ） and can be understood as information processing , especially when much abstraction or concretization is involved , or processes such as involving knowledge , expertise or learning for example are at work. Another definition of “cognition” is the mental process or faculty of knowing , including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

7． Inflection

【答案】 Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of inflectional affixes , such as number , person , finiteness , aspect and case , which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. For example, the past form of the verb work is realized by the addition of the inflectional suffix: „„-ed‟‟； the plural form of the noun child is realized by the inflectional suffix: „„-ren‟‟.

8． Compound

【答案】 Compound refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form, such as the compound words “blackboard” and “well-known”.

二、Essay-question

9． Advantages and Disadvantages of Componential Analysis.

【答案】 The componential analysis is a way to analyze the lexical meaning , which treats the meaning of a word as a composite of some smaller semantic units , which are called semantic components , or semantic features.

One advantage of componential analysis is that by specifying the semantic features of certain words, it will be possible to show how these words are related in meaning. For example，the two words “man” and “woman” share the features of +HUMAN, + ADULT, and + ANIMATE, but differ in the features of MALE. Additionally , the sense relations could be better accounted for. Two words , or two expressions , which have the same semantic components, will be synonymous with each other; words which have a contrasting component are antonyms; and words which have all the semantic components of another are hyponyms of the latter.

The semantic components are also able to explain sense relations between sentences, for example, the contradictory relationship, and the entailing relationship.

However , as have been found, there are also difficulties in the approach to analyze the meaning of a word in terms of semantic components. First, many words are polysemous. They have more than one meaning ; consequently they will have different sets of semantic components. Second, some semantic components are seen as binary taxonomies. However , sometimes the distinction to differentiate two

semantic components such as “ADULT” and “YOUNG”, is rather vague. Third, apart from the neatly organized parts of the vocabulary, there are words whose semantic components are difficult to ascertain. For example, the semantic components themselves, like HUMAN, ADULT, are not ordinary words of English ; they belong to a meta-language. To someone who does not know the meta-language , the semantic components explain nothing.

10．Advantages and Disadvantages of Immediate Constituent Analysis （IC Analysis）.

【答案】 Through IC analysis, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly, and if there is any ambiguity, it could be revealed. For example, how the sentence “Leave the book on the shelf” is ambiguous could be shown after the IC analysis.

However , there are also problems in IC analysis. First, at the beginning, some advocators insisted on binary divisions, that is, any construction, at any level, will be cut into two parts. But this is not always possible. For example, in the phrase “men and women”，it is not appropriate to combine “and” with only the preceding part or only the succeeding part. Second , constructions with discontinuous constituents will pose technical problems for tree diagrams in IC analysis. For example, in “make it up” the phrasal verb “make up” is separated by a pronoun. Third，which is also the most serious problem; there are structural ambiguities which cannot be revealed by IC analysis, as shown in “the love of God”. In IC analysis，the different relations of “God” to the word “love” cannot be shown which makes the expression ambiguous.

11．What do you think are the similarities and dissimilarities between learning a first and a second language?

【答案】 Similarities between first and second language acquisition:

（1） Both LI and L2 are constructed from prior conceptual knowledge. Language emerges as a procedural acquisition to deal with events that the child already understands conceptually and to achieve communicative objectives that the child can realize by the other means.

（2）Second language learners seem to use similar strategies to those learning their first language.

（3）Overgeneralization and transfer are used by both LI and L2 learner as the result of a necessity to reduce language to the simplest possible system, as an effort to lessen the cognitive burden involved in trying to master something as complex as language.

（4）The L2 learner, like the first, attempts to “regularize, analogize, and simplify” in an effort to communicate.

（5）Speech addressed to children （motherese ） and speech addressed to foreigners （foreign talk） present similarities : shorter sentences , high-frequency vocabulary , “here and now” times , indirect correction , frequent gesture， lack of overt attention to form.

（6） A reasonable hypothesis is that the brain and nervous system are biologically programmed to acquire language （LI and L2） in a particular sequence and in a particular mode （silent period）.

（7）Both groups are probably using the same learning process. For example, the L2 sequence for English grammatical morphemes was similar , though not identical , to that found in LI acquisition. Other similar sequences of syntactic acquisition have been found in LI and L2 learning. L2 learners such as L2 learners, like LI children, at first put negative elements at the beginning of the sentence “No the sun shining, ” and then progress to negation within the sentence “That‟s no ready.”

Differences between LI and L2 acquisition: